He fell. Sprawled. Broken. Finished. There was white now in his hair and he thought with giddy amazement, I am Amadeus after all. As was foretold, as is preordained, our names, together, writ in the book of the world in our own commingled blood. Why do I care?
The book. The useless book.
Written for Man. For the Chosen of God.
Not for him and his. Not for his kith.
Not for the vampire. Never that.
Why am I fighting it?
And she found him like that, the little whore, found him weeping with the humor of irony and his forgotten pain. And he looked at her over one shoulder, spitting frozen strands of his hair away, in complete abhorrence of all she was. Fucking whore. That was what she was. All she was. Monster. Medusa who bad bewitched him.
Lilith.
Cunt.
"Caro," she spoke softly, coming toward him, as to the savage or the sick or the dead.
He answered her not at all.
"Beloved--"
He exploded. "Don't say that," he spat. "Don't ever fucking call me that, you fucking bitch!"
She frowned and reached for him and he cowered, bared his teeth in a treacherous smile like an animal trapped in its warren with no hope of escape. He was cold, cold as death, and it was dark and her face glowed pale and as perfect as the cold Valentine moon overhead, a moon that never left, that would keep him in its lunar spell forever.
But she was not Debra, had never been Debra. Debra was dead. And now, at last, so was he. She loved him, perhaps, but what she loved was dead and loveless. "I never asked for you," he told her with enormous honesty and articulation. "I'm not like you! I'm not like you at all! I hate you, I hate you to death, to hell!"
Perhaps she wept or died under his words, but what did it matter? It was his craft to destroy, his obligation. It was what Amadeus had fashioned him for, his only purpose
He was a slayer.
A machine built for only one purpose.
He was an angel, a harbinger of death.
And he wept tears of blood.
24
His dreams were full of blood and trouble and he woke from them gratefully.
He woke but did not open his eyes.
He woke beneath the weight of a heavy tome.
He woke sensing intuitively that it was their birthday today, his and Debra's. Valentine's Day. The day of their birth, thirteen years ago.
He wondered where Debra was, wished he knew so that he could say to her what he was thinking, so she could share his odd emotions of memory and mourning with her. But she was never around much anymore, rushing here and there with those musicians and biker-types she seemed to favor to his company, lingering only long enough to fight with him or taunt him and call him a slayer--though, in fact, he had not yet even presented a single offering to the golgotha, hadn't even yet experienced his Grand Testing. Still, the word slayer came off her tongue like a freshet of deadly poison profanity.
Slayer. What are you afraid of, slayer? What do you want, slayer?
In the last five years Debra had tried shamelessly to lure him from the arms of the Coven to the world she'd said she'd discovered beyond its walls, a world alien and strange and ugly and full, he knew, of things brief and breakable.
And the other slayers talked.
Debra knew the city hives a little too well. Those of Carfax and others. She knew Akisha, Carfax's chosen mate, a little too well. She had taken him to the club a few times. Akisha had given him looks from across the room, but he usually shuddered and just made for the door. At home, Debra dueled in cruel words with the Father and many others of the Coven. She treated her people like her enemy. She treated the vampires running loose in the city like her fucking family. She tortured his brother Booker with teasing touches and obscene promises and her sinisterly lashed brown eyes
In five years Debra had learned nothing. Become nothing.
And now she was gone. Today. On their birthday.
It was their fight last night, he knew.
"It does exists! Byron says and Byron knows everything about everything!"
He had been in his cell cleaning his sword when she started, oiling it with a cloth and making a mirror of the blade. Trying to avoid the coming fight. Debra was poised across the table in her silk camisole, the fabric like a sheer red mist around the new, demanding angles of her body. A body she no doubt used to get Akisha and this Byron character to do whatever she wanted them to. And what tricks did she ask of them? What games did they play in those underground leather bars? He couldn't help but wonder about the black painted walls of the Lower Eastside club called The Abyssus that she so favored. Better to hide bloodstains? he couldn't help but wonder when he was there.
And Byron. What the hell kind of name was Byron anyway?
"Alek."
He looked away. This does not concern me.
"Look at me, Alek."
He looked at his sword instead.
"You bastard," she said, her voice coarse now, the roundness of womanhood tainted with the fury of childhood still. "You fucking bastard, how could you think those things?"
He looked at her at last, looked her up and down. The way she painted and pierced herself up these days, she reminded him of the dollar whores that hung with the pushers and pimps on the wharfside near the Hudson. How else could he think?
But where he expected a fury of grief and tears and pain at that thought going to her, there was only pity, black and cold. "No, beloved," she whispered, "you may put your most impure thoughts aside, I am not sleeping with Byron or anyone else. Though perhaps I should. How would that make you feel to know I was? How would you feel to know I was selling my body?"
His fingers bit into the hilt of the sword until the blood fled from his cuticles.
"Why don't you look at me anymore? You know my face; you know my body. What are you afraid of, slayer?"
She snaked narrowly across the length of the table that was all that separated them and all that saved him from her. She seized his hands, and by consequence his sword dropped uselessly to the table. "What are you afraid of, little Puritan?" she asked once more and pressed his hands to the cold poreless flesh of her face that was so like the stone skin of some savage goddess stolen from her sacred garden. "This?"
No. Of course not.
"This?" she asked in a little hiss as she moved his hands to the new perfect fullness of her breasts under the gauzy material.
Still he did nothing, felt the whole of his being tremble with silent fear.
She smiled with divine wickedness. "How about this?" she hissed and lowered his hands further, down over her belly, down further--
He jerked and stood up away from her, his chair toppling. How he wanted to harm her in that moment, but what could he say that she would believe? What could he call her that she would not laugh off?
She came around the table, stalking him like a predator, and trapped him against the wall of his cell. She put her hands on him, kissed him. He resisted her, and then he did not. It seemed pointless. She kissed his mouth, licked it like a puppy licking the lips of her beloved owner. But not like a puppy would kiss.
He felt something alien surge inside him. Felt it grow and gather like a bad storm. Felt it pull at his insides until they ran.
"Don't you love me anymore, Alek?" she asked in her aching, breathy little girl's voice.
"You're my life," he told her honestly.
She kissed him again, but lightly this time, at only the corners of his mouth. "Then be with me. Believe in me. Believe in Byron. We can leave here tonight and go and have all kinds of adventures." She smiled, dropped her voice conspiratorially. "Byron says he has the Chronicle. He says no one will dare oppose us with it. Come with us, we can have so much fun!"
He touched her rosy, flushed cheek with sadness. "The Chronicle is a story, Debra. A joke. Byron's just leading you on."
Debra hissed and dashed his hands away from her face. "It's real! Damnit, Alek, the streets whisper th
e story if you'll only listen. It's not a story! It's all real!" She took a deep breath, composing herself, and said, "The humans will kill us, Alek. Soon. Maybe in the next fifty years or so. And it won't matter then what name we put on ourselves, vampire, slayer, it won't matter! We're marked, do you understand? Marked."
He narrowed his eyes at her, at this foolishness she'd nettled from her restless jaunts into the city underground, foolishness she was being fed by underworld lifeforms who went around calling themselves names like Byron. He knew his catechism. He knew the words of the sacred Covenant by heart. "Amadeus says its a myth," he tried to explain. "A story, Debra, contrived by the vamps in their fear of the church. There is no Chronicle. The Father--"
"Damn the Father!"
"The Father says--"
"Fuck the Father!"
He let her go. This was useless. It was 1962 and the whole world was mad with ideas, it seemed. War. Peace. The Summer of Love. More war. Everyone was just fucking out of their minds. He went, solemn, back to his seat and began to shine his sword once more.
"Slayer," Debra hissed as she dressed herself for the night. "Go on and draw the blood of your own people, Alek. Bathe in it. Drown in it for all I care. Go on and stay here in this cage and be the pet of Amadeus the Mad." She faced him in her leather coat, links of bone growing from her ears, her eyes dusky with makeup, her lips a bitter, brutal red gash as she leaned forward and breathed in his ear. "But be warned, beloved, there will be a reckoning, a Dies Irae, and it will be sung at the Requiem Mass of the Covenmaster Amadeus, the betrayer of all our people."
And then she stalked artistically away.
And now, awakening, he realized that she was gone. Out at one of her haunts. On their birthday. Where was she? He wanted to--
I'm here.
He gasped and felt the thin, perfect weight upon him that was not some large tome.
Alek opened his eyes.
She was astride him, her knees locked around his hips. She had undone the buttons of his nighshirt in his sleep and her nakedness and heat was soldered to his own as natural as two old links. Her face came up from where it had been lying in the hollow of his throat. Her hands flashed out, greedy and powerful, and pinned his shoulders. She peered down at him from under her sooty lashes as if to observe him from an enormous height. She smiled. She breathed on his face, his throat. "Happy birthday to you," she sang softly as her eyes deepened, blackened. "Happy birthday to you. Happy biiirthday, dear beloved, happy birthday to you..."
He tried to utter her name as if in doing so he could stop her, seize her up in mid-stride, but her mouth was too quick to cover his own and kill the sound. He felt her mind touch his in an intimacy that was new and frightening, and he tried to think of thoughts to anger her, to make her go, but nothing came, no argument, no rebuke, only an unformed plea for completion. She kissed him and he shuddered fiercely beneath her work, the shell carefully placed around him by five long years of Covenpractice, that shell with its volumes and Rites and ordinances, its music and art and study, suddenly cracked open and allowed all the doubt and dread and passion to pour into him like strange waters.
His hands sought her back as she leaned over his throat, kissed and licked a seamless path to his lips, her hair tenting them in together. He held her, crushed her to him, body and soul. He shuddered once more, but what she'd destroyed now was the barrier of his own self-consciousness. He lifted the heavy veil of her hair away from her face and kissed her, his teeth hard at her lips, for the first time in years freely admitting his need for her, for the completion that was her. He feared her and he feared he would lose himself in her and would disavow the Coven, but the fear of dying without ever knowing her was far, far worse. And then she was kissing him back and the past and the future were as unreal as shadows, vanishing into only the now, and now there were no rules, no Covens, no names for what they were, no distinctions, no borders drawn by philosophers' hands to separate them from the Children of Eve or the Lilith.
What am I doing?
His eyes fluttered closed under the assault of her mouth, and he realized all at once that they belonged to all the races, all at once, impossibly, like an ethereal enchantment. She growled deep, her lips yielding, then demanding of him, fitting his as if they were only one body. Her hands slid under his shirt, down further, bold arcs of fire over his chill, a sacred dance across his naked flesh.
What what what am I doing?
And when he ventured forth to do the same, to trace the sacred lines of her perfumed flesh, first with his fingertips and then with his lips, he felt her thoughts, her eagerness, the hunger bottled up inside her all these long years. And his own. And together that one voice abolished the last of reason and Amadeus from his mind.
My life. My blood and flesh and strength. Impossible to say whose thought.
Reaching, he laid his palm to her cheek, touching her carefully, as if she were as delicate as she seemed, and inside the intimacy of the touch he sensed the edge of some shadow, some shade of grief buried deep within her, as if she knew their love could only end in some inevitable goodbye.
"It's all right, Debra," he told her. "I'm here and I won't let us be apart."
Her eyes looked wet, impossibly far away. "You can't know forever, beloved. Don't try."
"I don't un--"
"Quiet, beloved. We have no future and no past. Only this. Only now."
He could make not a sound, could not even move, when her lips brushed away and rested at his temple and he felt her fleet pulse under his mouth, the rush of her blood like the voice of the ocean in his ears. Hesitantly he kissed her throat, first with his lips and then with his teeth, and the yolky, familiar taste he'd not known in a lifetime of five years pooled into his mouth, keening his senses, narrowing them to the point of near pain, where he felt certain they could fly from the very skin of the earth if they so desired.
"Fly with me, Alek," she pleaded in her sweet little voice, impossible to deny. "Tonight. Before it's too late, before--" Her voice cracked on such a sigh of joy and pleasure he found he had no words to deny her. Found he had no heart to.
So much to say, to tell her, show her...and if she left him, what then? What would he be without her? He didn't know, didn't want to discover what. So he told her yes, yes, beloved, because he must and because he chose to, and kissing her, disentangling himself from her, he prepared to leave with her that very night.
"You can't go, you can't!"
Alek packed the lost of their things in a single suitcase, his and Debra's favorite books and clothes and sketches, Debra's doll. He touched Debra's magic ring at his throat on its chain and looked up,
It was early evening, just after practice in the Abbey, just before dinner, and Booker stood by the dolphin window, the diffused bluish light of dusk on his cheek and white cotton oxford shirt, giving his upper half the all-over look of grey marble, a statue scarcely alive. But his eyes moved, blinked, fluttered with disbelief.
"For chrissakes, Alek--"
"I can't stay, Book. Not...now." He tossed aside his skein of too-long hair and forced the last articles into the carpetbag, shirts and trousers, no habits, a pair of scissors, no sword. The sword remained cased and untouched under his bad. Almost a shame, it was such a beautiful piece of art, hut where would he need it? "You don't understand what it's like. I belong to her, it's--hard to explain."
"You'll be just like her," Booker argued. "The Father says. You'll turn..."
But Book just didn't understand, couldn't understand. Booker was homeless without the Coven, familyless. Booker was the Father's son; Alek was only his resident.
And, of course, Booker didn't have Debra.
"Turn into what?" Alek asked, angry now, angry for a target. "A fucking bat? Fucking Bela Lugosi?"
"You know what. Christ, Alek, you can't just walk out!"
"Keep your voice down!" he hissed, sitting on the suitcase to squash it and latch it tight.
Booker flared his nostrils and looked at the
window. Hot in here suddenly. Alek wished Book would cut it out with that shit. Did he want the bedclothes to go up?
He stopped fiddling with the latch, narrowed his eyes on his chosen brother. "Look, Book--"
"Has the Father given you the Rite of Blood?" Booker demanded, turning back around.
"What?"
"The Rite of Blood," Booker repeated, sounding now angry himself, indirectly betrayed. "Have you tasted his blood?"
Alek lifted the suitcase, almost did not answer, then set it down. "What kind of question is that?"
"Answer it."
"No."
"You have."
"It's none of your fucking business if I have or not!" Alek shouted, momentarily forgetting to hush his voice. He shivered, held still a moment, held his breath and wondered if the Father would stalk in any moment in a storm of black robes and find him like this, in the midst of betrayal. But Amadeus did not mystically appear and Book only continued to look wounded, ever more betrayed. They'd never kept secrets from each other, the two of them, they were brothers, damnit, but this thing--
"You never told me," said Booker.
Alek hefted the suitcase and this time did not set it down. "It doesn't matter to me," he said.
"It matters to him. You belong to the Father. He'll hunt you down."
What did he care? He'd shared blood with Debra. But in that case it was different; the blood was Debra's, belonged to her. With Amadeus it was only borrowing. Amadeus understood that. "He won't hunt me," he retorted, and his voice sounded very brave and sure to himself, sort of like the cheer of a Viking before they went into battle, he thought. Why shouldn't it? "He loves me, he said so. And he's always let us come and go."
Slayer Page 30